Quantitative assessment of moisture content in transformer oil-paper insulation based on extended Debye model and PDC

In order to assess the moisture content of insulating pressboard in oil-immersed transformer, and thus providing reliable guidance for insulation condition and life estimation of oil-immersed transformer, in this paper, we made four groups of oil-paper insulation samples with different moisture content under laboratory conditions and studied the relationship between pressboard and moisture content by using polarization and depolarization current (PDC) technique. The experiment result shows that PDC curve is very sensitive to the change of moisture content, and the change of moisture content mainly affects the tail of depolarization current curve; the extended Debye model parameters can be obtained from depolarization current curve, and as the moisture content increases the number of branches in Debye model increases, the largest time constant becomes large; the peak of time domain spectroscopy turn up at 1000s., the time constant branch which is longer than 1000s presents the pressboard branches of Debye model; the feature quantity Qpaper can show the internal polarization of insulating paper and has a linear fitting relationship with moisture content, so Qpaper can be used to assess the moisture content of insulating pressboard.